Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. – Soren Kierkegaard
Gorillas are social animals that live together in troops. Troop size ranges from as few as five to more than 30 individuals, depending on species, available resources and reproductive success.
There is only one silverback male per troop but a few younger adult males may be part of the troop or live on the fringes of a troop. Females, juveniles and infants comprise the rest of the troop’s population.
The silverback ape acts as the troop’s leader. He defines the troop’s territory and has breeding rights to any adult females in the troop. He also determines aspects the troop’s routine, such as feeding times, diet and sleeping times.
Although not generally aggressive, a silverback male will display aggressive behavior toward other males, especially those of another troop.
As extremely powerful, large primates, nearly 400 pounds, compared to their female counterparts at a mere 200 pounds, silverback gorillas live mostly in the jungles that surround African mountain ranges. To sustain a body that size, silverback gorillas need to eat a lot of food every day, and make sure they get all the right nutrients into their systems.
The bulk of the mountain gorilla diet is vegetation. They eat a lot of shoots, leaves and plant matter. There are actually about 142 varieties of plants represented in the silverback’s diet, including bamboo, celery, nettles, thistles and succulent herbs. When they can get them, they also love to eat any wild berries they can find. To sustain their weight, they need to eat about 60 pounds of food every day.
Occasionally, the silverback will also eat grubs or bugs. If the gorillas happen to find a wild ant nest, they will break into it and eat the ants inside. Silverbacks also eat rotting wood and small animals from time to time. Though their primary diet consists of much easier-to-find vegetation, the silverback gorilla, like humans, are an omnivorous species: they can eat meat or plants as they choose.
In the jungle, water is not extremely easy to find in pools or streams. Fortunately, gorillas are not actually affected by this because their diet includes bamboo shoots, succulent herbs, and many fruits which contain a lot of water. Bamboo, especially, is about 84 percent water. In the 60 pounds of vegetation they consume daily, there is enough water to sustain the gorilla, especially during the rainy season.
Gorillas have three main feeding periods each day to reach the approximately 60 pounds of food they need. Between these periods, they generally spend the remaining part of the day resting. They will rest longer when it’s raining heavily, putting off their next meal until the weather calms down. Silverback gorillas are extensive travelers, moving great distances to find the food needed to sustain them and the entire family group.
The silverback gorillas are the dominant adult males of the group; they usually develop the gray saddle that earns them their name at around 12 years old. A group will generally have only one or two silverbacks, several younger males with black backs, and a number of females and children.
The dominant silverback is the leader. He is in charge of finding the group food. The silverback is also the one who mates with most of the females and fathers most of the offspring in the group.
Glossary: base, adjective (1)
Definition of base (Entry 3 of 4)
1a: lacking or indicating the lack of higher qualities of mind or spirit : IGNOBLE seemed a base betrayal of idealism— L. M. Sears; appealing to a person’s baser instincts
b: lacking higher values : DEGRADING a drab base way of life
2a: being of comparatively low value and having relatively inferior properties (such as lack of resistance to corrosion)a base metal such as iron
3 feudalism
a: resembling a villein: SERVILEa base tenant
b: held by villenage base tenure
4 archaic : of little height… the cedar stoops not to the base shrub’s foot …— Shakespeare
5 archaic : BASEBORN… base in kind and born to be a slave.— William Cowper
6 obsolete : low in place or position… fall to the base earth from the firmament!— Shakespeare
Definition of Stockholm syndrome
: the psychological tendency of a hostage to bond with, identify with, or sympathize with his or her captor
First Known Use of Stockholm syndrome
1978, in the meaning defined above
History and Etymology for Stockholm syndrome
from a 1973 robbery attempt in Stockholm, Sweden, during which bank employees held hostage developed sympathetic feelings toward their captors
Addendum. Another piece of the puzzle perhaps.
Imagine you are asked to watch a short video (above) in which six people-three in white shirts and three in black shirts-pass basketballs around. While you watch, you must keep a silent count of the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. At some point, a gorilla strolls into the middle of the action, faces the camera and thumps its chest, and then leaves, spending nine seconds on screen. Would you see the gorilla?
Almost everyone has the intuition that the answer is “yes, of course I would.” How could something so obvious go completely unnoticed? But when we did this experiment at Harvard University several years ago, we found that half of the people who watched the video and counted the passes missed the gorilla. It was as though the gorilla was invisible.
This experiment reveals two things: that we are missing a lot of what goes on around us, and that we have no idea that we are missing so much.
One of the best-known experiments in psychology, the Gorilla Experiment is described in most introductory textbooks and featured in more than a dozen science museums. Used by everyone from preachers and teachers to corporate trainers and terrorist hunters, even characters on the TV show C.S.I., to help explain what we see and what we don’t see.
I see the gorilla.